Reply to post: Re: playing with the politics of pandemics

Re: playing with the politics of pandemics

@Dan55

This is a rubbish answer - the OP says there were viable plans from the 1970s for the national supply by the army to all households in the nation (or to national "camps"), with testing. That would need to be PCR testing for covid, not fever and pustule checks.

The smallpox outbreak you give is so very vastly different, it is a symptomatically identifiable condition, known and understood to epidemiologists and doctors, patient-0 was diagnosed and was identified early. The symptoms are unique and do not resemble other endemic conditions (such as flu or the cold for covid)

Hell there's even a smallpox laboratory in the hospital, because they were researching it. They needed to contact say 500 people for tracing. Let's say 1000. It is a disease that is serious or fatal - to *all*, so people take it seriously.

Very little from that could have been applied to covid-19, by the time it was even vaguely identified to exist, it was in the population, globally. That's why it is called a pandemic.

It is utterly naive to put that smallpox outbreak as an example of what could be done for covid. To evens start resembling it would be like Jane Parker taking the london tube in rush hour mutiple times. On the lines to heathrow and victoria station. And the infection presenting as an asymptomatic infectious carrier.

I'd still like to see evidence of this magical NATIONAL 1970s *pandemic* plan where the army, wearing hazmat suits apparently, but not spreading any infection, would feed and test the entire nation for the N months whatever pandemic orgamism would take to clear from the population. I'd imagine in that picture the infected would be left to die (or army style open wards?).

The plans make more sense to be about a bioweapon attack, like anthrax or something, not a pandemic response. It would be a war like reponse - to cut losses quickly for the country, and the absolute priority would be to stop the spread even at the cost of *individual* lives. I'd imagine the protocol would be to quarantine and bulk medicate, instead of individual treatment plans.

Covid-19 is not deadly enough to the majority for a war reaction to be considered a proportional response by the population.

So if there is a 1970s plan for a *pandemic*, I'd be curious. No nation in the entire world has implemented such a response of mass army led isolation camps. Not one.